Mood: poised, forbearing

And my physical constitution is rather restored. I’ll have to chalk up today as being my first real day back in the world of the living – excuse me as I lean down to knock on the wooden floor; the desk is wood-veneer – because yesterday wasn’t a picnic either. Despite getting back to my routine yesterday, there were still occasional bouts of doubling over in pain. But routines are restorative. I don’t think I’d be in as good shape this morning if I hadn’t had a healthy and good sized dinner at the Coliseum (Irish pub near Columbus Circle) with a certain Samaritan, or if I hadn’t had my nightcap of one (just one, Dad) Guinness. Thus, I’m back.

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RECENTLY ACQUIRED:

o Eels, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations

o Marvin Gaye, Here, My Dear

o Stars, Heart

o Geoffrey G. O’Brien, The Guns and Flags Project (poems)

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REDEMPTION OF AT LEAST ONE FORTUNE 500 CO.

Thanks to B________’s stellar performance this past holiday season, those in its employ received some $50 USD in thanks for their services: thus, the above acquisitions. As I’ve said of B________ before: as faceless corporations go, they demonstrate real heart on numerous occasions. There are other examples that pertain to the Event, but for my lionizing and appreciation to have any real effect I’d have to praise certain individuals, and I can’t do that w/o naming names, which I’ve resolved not to do. Anyway. I realize that there’s some telling humor in the fact that I haven’t acknowledged this aspect of this co. until now, when they’ve handed out their handouts, but I hope it’s pretty clear that the free shite and country baskets don’t compare to the waving-aside of work concerns when you’ve got to get home for what I had to get home for. They don’t compare to the suggestion, even the order, that you not let something so insignificant-in-the-long-run as work even enter your mind while you’re home contending with a sibling’s act and its aftermath. That’s what I was told, actually, and it really I suppose one does expect that from a place of employment, given such circumstances. Still, I was surprised, gratified, and touched to actually witness the mindful prioritization and true human concern demonstrated in those first few days a month ago. Those are the gestures that I remember and value. So. It’s not completely evil, B________. And it’s barely a Fortune 500. Only # 475.

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AN ACCIDENTAL PARTIAL REVIEW OF BLINKING LIGHTS ON THE WAY TO DISCUSSING ISSUES OF ART AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

But as I was planning on saying, part of the titular poised and forbearing feeling stems from that Eels record, which isn’t brand-new, but is the newest thing from the Eels. If you don’t know about this record, you should know first that the Eels are essentially just one fellow, Mark Oliver Everett. He goes by E. E guided the Eels through the 90s alt-this and alt-that phases with an admirable level of moxie and willingness to try pretty much anything once. Their songs are rooted in singer-songwritery Americana, but they’ve been longtime fans of Beck-style additions of electronic textures and beats related to funk. Lyrics are of a pretty high standard throughout the Eels’ records. They had that radio hit you probably sang along to in ’96 or ’97, “Novocaine For the Soul” (you know, “…Before I sputter out”). In fact, I first learned about the Eels back in college when D. Douglas Eldridge (who I suppose has yet to Google his name and find this site; I hope he does soon) filled me in about Beautiful Freak and the rest of their work. I was too busy filling in the larger Costello and Springsteen holes in my musical learning at the time to delve fully into a somewhat fringe critical darling’s work.

Only last year, in Oregon – kudos to the exemplary music selection at the Eugene Public Library – did I rediscover the Eels in the form of Electro-Shock Blues. Which is a phenomenal record. Those who know me know – I hope they do – that I try to shy from superlatives like phenomenal unless I really believe in them. Much good ink has been spilled about the strength and power of this record; much of that ink is online and Googleable. Suffice it to say that it’s a killer record about mortality. “Catchy pop songs about death” is one tagline that you’ll see somewhere online about it. That’s too fey to sum up how good the record is: melodically pleasant, but lyrically catastrophic in terms of the degree to which you realize, listening, how aware the singer and the song are about the fact that one day he the singer and it the song will pass away. Listening, you tend to realize this about yourself. Any piece of art that does this, you ask me, is worth its weight in gold.

But what separates Blinking Lights from Electro-Shock is mainly its size and scope. E’s long tended to take his personal history as his material. We’ve all been the better for it. His lyrics are highly personal articulations of the struggles he’s had and observations he’s made about, well, death, love, sex, the other Important Stuff. But Blinking Lights is the most autobiographical work he’s done yet. As such, it’s an appropriately sprawling work.

Why am I talking about the Eels and their – or E’s – autobiographical impulses with respect to his art? I think the reason is this: since I’ve been having trouble writing Good Ground, but haven’t had trouble writing poems about Jon, I feel the need for a revamped approach to or use of autobiographical fact as something that’ll fuel new poems and stories and chapters to the novel.

Two refinements in what I’ve just said:

1) The poems are about Jon, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, they’re very different than the conversational but still “heroic-epic” tone (kind of like the mock-heroics of the 18th and 19th Cents., except sincere, which I suppose makes it “mock-mock heroic”). Rather than my typical rhetoric-filled Whitman-like orations, I’ve been writing these briefer lyrics, highly fanciful, circling around themes such as guilt, catching things that are falling, magical weird things that jump between subjects and claims and counterclaims but still usually involve a speaker and a “he”. We all know who those two people are, don’t we. So they’re about Jon, but in a way that’s unusual for me.

2) I don’t want to revamp Good Ground such that it refers directly to what’s happened and what has happened in my family. After all, as a first novel, it’s already autobiographical enough. I suppose that what I want to do is tap into the very real heart of how I’ve been feeling and living in the previous month and figure out how to transform the new and still-evolving notions of “stakes” and “what matters” into the novel. I want to figure out how to distill the emotional meaning (if not the facts and the other content) of what happened into my own story-in-progress. Does this make any sense? What I’m really talking about is a sort of transmogrification of one kind of real-life pain into another kind of written pain. This is on my mind in part because I’m listening to Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, which was written and recorded as a kiss-off to his ex-wife, who, as a result of some highly contentious legal proceedings, wrangled Marvin into recording an album solely to pay her off during the divorce. As a result, Here, My Dear is a near-perfect reflection of how Marvin was thinking and feeling during that upheaval in his life. Life and art dovetailed neatly for him, blurred into each other. There’s less one-to-one overlap between the life and the art in my own case, because I’m not interested in fictionalizing what happened. I’m dealing as well and as directly as I can with what happened here on this website; it’s been an ineffably good thing.

If I had to sum up that whole off-kilter paragraph you've just hopefully gotten through, I suppose I would do so by saying something like this: there’s been a huge amount of emotional power, destructive and creative, in the last 31 days, and I want to harness that power in words in order to tell a story that, while different in plot and characters and theme, will affect its reader with a similar level of power. That’s all.

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Speaking of the novel, I have about 45 minutes to dedicate to it before I go for a run. That’s how back-to-normal I feel – at least in matters of the body.